Black Marina by Emma Tennant Page B

please,’ which is about the only ice-cream name she seems to have byheart. And I go with her to the big treezer and Sanjay comes too: thank heaven it’s as far as you can get from the Craft Centre door.
    ‘So what’s new, Holly?’ Sanjay says in his quiet, confidential tone, while I hand the poor girl her ice. Her face is quite red and blotchy, and it looks like she’s always crying. And I knew as I said, ‘Nothing’s new’, and Sanjay pretended to look in his trousers for change, and I said ‘I’ll mark it up’, that there was something new – and bad news too, and not so far from where we were standing. For when Sanjay and Pandora had taken their interminable time leaving, with Pandora dropping her ice and trying to scoop it up and Sanjay talking to her with love and exasperation, like you do to a child at the end of a long, long day, I went quietly into the Craft Centre and peered down into the neck of the pot. The girl looked up at me, bold as brass.
    ‘You’re Holly, I know,’ she said. ‘And you were a friend of my mother, Teza. Ford is my father, see?’

EVENING
     

     
     
    Evening in the tropics – the time the white man of Empire traditionally sat down with a sundowner, or a sun’s- over-the -yardarm, or a noggin brought in by silent servants – came to Carib’s Rest Hotel, with its usual violet hush. A persimmon sky leaked over the verandah, where a white man did indeed sit, a copy of the London Times unfolded on his lap. His lip, upper and stiff. Dark hair so flattened down and made brilliant it looked ready to reflect the stars. Yet somewhere, in the small, hard eyes that had seen Eton and Christchurch and Teheran and Vientiane, Laos, and the starving crowds of Ethiopia, was a shifty, amused look. Although there were rumours that this man so obviously fitting the requirements must be a spy, it was also argued that it is hard to tell where sensitive reporting ends and espionage begins. Things did mysteriously happen when Maldwin Carr had just left a place – or they happened just before he turned up. But then he could claim that that was why in the first place he was there.
    The yacht lying out at anchor on a placid sea had been chartered in Barbados by Maldwin Carr. He was a first-class sailor and had taken only one crew on board – apart from the girl, of course, who was cook. More trouble was expected in this corner of the eastern Caribbean. Why else, as they gossiped in the London clubs where in December great flares were lit, showing a Christmas-cakey St James’s Palace through the rain or sudden gusts of hard, white hail, would Lockton, proprietor of the famous newspaper that employs Mal Carr, send him out there? And why was he, Mal Carr, the recipient of so enormous a salary? (Not that anyone knows what it is, but the amount in gossip currency rises and falls at lunch anddinner in the club, depending on whether it’s a bull or bear market.)
    The answer, so it goes, is this. Mal Can has such impeccable credentials, such agate integrity, that readers of this famous paper would no more think of mistrusting his judgement as the result of his investigations than they would think of performing a citizen’s arrest on Alec Guinness as Smiley or Sean Connery as Bond. Everyone knows that Maldwin Carr has his shirts made to measure at Turnbull and Asser and his Stilton to send to Lady Anthea at Christmas from Paxton and Whitfield, both in Jermyn Street, of course. So much the better. In this Royal Park of England, dreams take a long time to die. So even if Lockton has interests in Latin America and an obvious interest in preventing a left-wing régime from taking hold in islands adjacent to Grenada, his dispatching of Maldwin Carr to look at the situation in depth is entirely balanced and fair. Carr’s articles will be read with the port and cigars at the clubs in St James’s, and in humbler homes, in garden cities and shires. And many of the readers will do no more than reflect with